Tempesta di Mare's Roman holiday

Tempesta di Mare's co-directors, Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, have a knack for picking scholars who can deliver informative, entertaining pre-concert lectures. The featured savant at their latest outing was Wendy Heller, an expert on 17th and 18th Century opera, whose talk included some amusing bits about debauched, music-loving cardinals and the effects of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714, Louis XIV, Marlborough and all that) on George Frideric Handel's travels and contacts.

At one point Heller compared the Rome of the period to the setting of Humphrey Bogart's best-known movie. Representatives of the warring nations mingled and schemed in Rome in the same way they maneuvered in Casablanca.

But Heller also showed her audience how the theatrical, sensuous art that surrounded Handel in Catholic Rome differed from the paintings and sculpture he would have encountered in Protestant Germany. His Roman sojourn obviously influenced the future composer of such dramatic works as Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.

Handel traveled to Rome because Baroque Italy was a center of musical development. The Tempesta di Mare concert presented sonatas and cantatas he wrote in Rome and works by Alessandro Scarlatti that he would have heard.

Ideal vocalist

Roberts and Stone picked the vocalist for this occasion with the same sure touch they apply to lecturers. Clara Rottsolk possesses a soprano voice with the coloring of a mezzo— an ideal choice for music that was probably composed for male altos.

The cantatas she sang would have been performed in 18th-Century drawing rooms and princely halls— settings that would be more relaxed and informal than modern concert halls. Rottsolk's voice and expressive delivery successfully recreated that atmosphere for a modern ticket-buying audience seated in orderly rows.

Spirited fiddling

The three instrumental pieces on the program all opened with mood-setting slow movements, but they included their share of livelier interludes. Anyone who thinks fugues are formal exercises should listen to the spirited fiddling by Emlyn Ngai that introduced the fugal movement in Scarlatti's Sonata in C.

The musical pleasures Messrs. Handel and Scarlatti crammed into their creations included appealing sonorities for voice, strings, and winds; a duet that violinists Ngai and Karina Fox played with appropriate flair; a gentle pastoral solo for recorder that opened the evening; and the customary moments when the harpsichord and the cello support the soloists with a well timed flourish.

Found: A good venue

This was the first concert I've attended at the Friends' Arch Street Meeting House. It may, in fact, be the first concert any musical organization has presented in this venue. Third and Arch seems out of the way to those of us who live on the west side of Broad Street, but it's no more inconvenient than Old St. Joseph's Church on Willings Alley, near Third and Walnut, where I've attended concerts by Tempesta di Mare, Piffaro and Vox Amadeus.

Its attractions include pews that are padded and comfortably proportioned, several auxiliary rooms that can be used for lectures and receptions, and adequate rest room facilities. The closest Market Street bus stop is just one block away, and you can hop on the Market Street subway by trekking one more block to the Independence Hall stop at Fifth and Market. SEPTA is even building elevators at that stop, presumably for the benefit of stair-challenged Baroque connoisseurs.